Nutrition 101: What is Myfitnesspal?

Some of you may have heard about MyFitnessPal from friends and family on and off campus. However, I would like to inform and emphasize to you all what a great tool this application is.

MyFitnessPal is an app that you can download for free straight onto your iPhone or iPad. This application is an excellent way to track your everyday fitness and nutrition. Conveniently on your mobile device, you can add what you have eaten throughout the day to track your calories, and add the amount of exercise you had done for the day.

When first downloading the app, MyFitnessPal will ask you to fill out a profile. By filling out your profile, you can add you current weight and your goal weight by a certain date, or you can choose to just maintain your current weight. By adding your goals and activity level, MyFitnessPal will calculate your nutrition goals and break down the amount of calories, carbohydrates, protein and fat you should be having each day to reach your goal. Once you have set up your profile, the application is easily navigable.

You might question how this app will be useful to you, living on a college campus. The greatest thing about MyFitnessPal is besides being able to manually enter meals and snacks you eat for the day, it has the capability of connecting with Sodexo.

You can search for “Sodexo Health Care” in the app and MyFitnessPal will generate various Sodexo meals being served, with the proper nutrition facts for the serving size. This allows students to easily receive the correct nutrition facts for their meals without having to play the guessing game.

Besides manually searching for your food, MyFitnessPal also allows a user to scan the barcode on products, labels and signs and the app will calculate and add the nutrition facts to your food diary. If you have ever noticed in the Main Dining Hall, for the Mindful Mix entrees, there is often a sign next to the meal with the nutrition facts. This sign also has a barcode for the meal which can be scanned into MyFitnessPal. With a simple scan, the nutrition facts of your meal are added for your day.

This app can also be helpful for upperclassmen students that are living off campus and do not often go to Barone. Under the tab “My Recipes and Food,” MyFitnessPal allows you to create and save recipes that you cook to be easily added to your food diary. Also, under the tab “Hello Healthy,” it links to recent articles that provide healthy recipes, exercise ideas and information about nutrition.

Controlling your fitness and nutrition can be difficult to do alone. MyFitnessPal provides you with the option to connect with friends through your Facebook, contacts and email. With this, you can share nutrition and fitness ideas with friends to keep motivated. Another neat feature of MyFitnessPal is that you can connect it to step tracker, such as your Fitbit tracker. Your steps from your tracker will be calculated into exercise for the day on your MyFitnessPal.

MyFitnessPal is a useful and convenient app that allows people to easily keep track of their fitness and nutrition. This app is excellent for college students that have limited time, where they are given the ability to simply record their fitness and nutrition by a few clicks of a button.

If you have any questions or would like to see a demonstration on how to navigate the app, come to the first floor lounge of 70 McCormick Road on Wednesday, Nov. 12 at 9:00 p.m. to learn more.